PA Bill Number: HB2235
Title: Providing for regulation of the meat packing and food processing industry by creating facility health and safety committees in the workplace; ...
Description: Providing for regulation of the meat packing and food processing industry by creating facility health and safety committees in the workplace; ... ...
Last Action: Referred to LABOR AND INDUSTRY
Last Action Date: Apr 25, 2024
Ben Carson Is Right on Guns :: 10/08/2015
The left has a second amendment problem. It believes that the right to abortion and gay marriage are fixed in the Constitution — somewhere or other, you’ll just have to trust them — but the black-and-white guarantee of the right of individuals to own guns is a big misunderstanding.
On this issue, the left doesn’t particularly like or comprehend the country it lives in, especially that it was founded by men who distrusted government and sought to limit it by protecting certain essential individual rights, including gun ownership.
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The Second Amendment says, “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Liberals can readily accept all of that — except the part about not infringing on the right of the people to bear arms, which they think is a bit much.
They have their own articles of faith: It’s crazy to believe that gun rights were meant in part to protect us from the government (or, relatedly, that there is a right to revolution). The Second Amendment is an anachronism and ink blot. And anyone who tells you otherwise, like Ben Carson, is a kook.
The acute liberal commentator Ed Kilgore wrote a piece at Talking Points Memo the other day titled, “The Cult of the Second Amendment.” Think about how odd it is to accuse your opponents of having a cultish attachment to … the nation’s foundational law. Aren’t we all supposed to cherish (or at least pretend to cherish) the Constitution, and especially the Bill of Rights?
A writer for Rolling Stone, Jesse Berney, recoiled from a Ben Carson Facebook post citing his operating room experience and saying that bullet wounds aren’t “more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away.” In Berney’s gloss, “Ben Carson looks at the people who died, and their grieving families, and decides the most important thing is keeping the Second Amendment intact.”
But what exactly is the alternative to keeping the Second Amendment intact? Assuming Berney doesn’t have a plan for changing the Second Amendment that involves mustering two-thirds of the Congress and three-fourths of the states, he, too, favors keeping it intact (and presumably defying it).
No hit piece on Carson is complete without a sneering reference to his statements that gun rights were meant to be a protection against “tyranny.” This especially alarms Kilgore, who finds it disturbing that conservatives argue “that the main purpose of the Second Amendment is to keep open the possibility of revolutionary violence against the U.S. government.”
The main purpose of the Second Amendment was to enshrine in the Constitution the pre-existing and natural right to self-defense, and yes, that included defense against government (and especially a standing army). The context is easy to understand here — the Founders had just waged a war of revolution against an an overweening state, using guns. If they had all been disarmed prior to 1776, the result might have turned out a little differently.
Who are some other dangerously ill-informed people who agree with Ben Carson about gun rights and the protection they afford against tyranny?
Well, there’s Tench Coxe, a delegate to the Continental Congress from Pennsylvania, who wrote in 1789, “As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear their private arms.”
There’s St. George Tucker, a respected constitutional theorist who wrote the earliest commentary on the Second Amendment, “The right of self defence is the ï¬rst law of nature: in most governments it has been the study of rulers to conï¬ne this right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any colour or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction.”
There’s Joseph Story, who was nominated to the Supreme Court by none other than James Madison: “The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them.”
Rather than engage with or accept this history, the left seeks to erase it, when not merely laughing it off. Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker thinks the Founders got together in Philadelphia for what was, in part, a gun-control convention. He argues in The New Yorker, “If the Founders hadn’t wanted guns to be regulated, and thoroughly, they would not have put the phrase ‘well regulated’ in the amendment.”
This is almost too silly for words. When they wrote “well-regulated,” the Founders weren’t thinking of what OSHA or the FDA does. They simply meant a well-disciplined militia. And the militia was, as a practical matter, all able-bodied male citizens.
Almost no one seriously doubted that the Second Amendment protected an individual right to bear arms until the 20th century. The opinion of the Supreme Court in D.C. v. Heller persuasively argues that the prefatory clause of the Second Amendment announces a purpose of the amendment (maintaining a militia), but it doesn’t limit the operative clause that sets out a “right of the people.”
Some advocates of gun control wave all of this off, because they say that their proposals are too minor to run afoul of the Constitution. This may be true, but their proposals are also too minor to make any real difference in a country with roughly 300 million guns. The real prize is more sweeping.
President Barack Obama last week cited Australia as an example to be emulated; the Aussies adopted a de facto confiscation program — in the form of a mandatory buy-back program — that took as much as a third of its guns out of circulation. Josh Marshall, the editor of Talking Points Memo, stated it with admirable clarity the other day, “In other words, yes, we really do want to take your guns. Maybe not all of them. But a lot of them.”
In its anti-Citizens United crusade, the left is at least honest that it seeks to amend the First Amendment to allow more restrictions on election-related expenditures. It should be as forthright on guns, and begin to undertake a generational effort to strike a major provision from the nation’s foundational law.
As it works its way down through the various annoyances and outrages of the Bill of Rights, the Third Amendment is presumably safe — at least for now.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/10/democrats-guns-second-amendment-213229
